From 1967 through 1975, the Fleer company issued a series of attractive cloth patches featuring the names, logos, and emblems of most Major League Baseball franchises. What I have for you today is the 1968 cloth patch set, specifically the ten American League teams from that season.

Each patch set was comprised of three smaller patches — one with the primary team logo, a smaller secondary logo hat patch, and a team name shoulder patch. The entire set measures 2.5″ by 4.2″, which is why they’re known as “tallboys” by collectors.

Courtesy the Georgia State University Library collection comes this group of neat images showing scenes from the opening of an A&P supermarket in the Williamsburg Village shopping center, located in Atlanta, Georgia. These were taken on May 12, 1965 and showcase the grocery giant’s still-new Centennial style, first rolled out in 1959. The affair is complete with men dressed in 18th century Colonial American garb.

The opening was covered by Atlanta radio station WGST, as seen in the picture with their mobile news vehicle.

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I bring this up for no reason in particular, but we only have 66 days until Halloween 2013 is upon us. I will likely be participating in the Countdown to Halloween again this year (assuming there is one), so really there are just over 30 days until the festivities begin. Until then, enjoy this vintage Kodachrome image of a pair of kids celebrating Halloween, 1950s style.

Since it’s the off-season I thought I’d start a fun project involving NFL history. So I’m going to go division by division and post galleries of football cards (when available) featuring all NFL players who have had their jersey numbers retired by their teams. This week it’s the four squads of the AFC West — the Denver Broncos, Kansas City Chiefs, Oakland Raiders, and San Diego Chargers.

Previous galleries: AFC East, NFC East, AFC North, NFC North, AFC South, NFC South

Denver Broncos (3)

#7 — John Elway

#18 — Frank Tripucka

#44 — Floyd Little

Kansas City Chiefs (10)

#3 — Jan Stenerud

#16 — Len Dawson

#18 — Emmitt Thomas

#28 — Abner Haynes

#33 — Stone Johnson

On August 30, 1963, rookie RB/KR Stone Johnson suffered a fractured vertebra in his neck during a preseason game against the Houston Oilers while returning a kickoff. He died on September 8 at the age of 23. Although he was only on the team’s active roster during the 1963 preseason, his jersey number 33 was posthumously retired.

#36 — Mack Lee Hill

Just two years after Johnson’s tragic death, the Chiefs suffered another grievous loss when second-year back Mack Lee Hill died at age 25 from complications following knee surgery. A year later, Kansas City established the Mack Lee Hill Award to honor the rookie who best exemplifies Hill’s spirit.

#58 — Derrick Thomas

On February 8, 2000, Derrick Thomas died from a massive blood clot that developed in his paralyzed lower extremities and traveled to his lungs. His paralysis was the result of severe injuries sustained in a car accident weeks earlier. On January 31, 2009, Thomas was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his fifth year of eligibility.

#63 — Willie Lanier

#78 — Bobby Bell

#86 — Buck Buchanan

Oakland Raiders (0)

The Raiders have never retired any jersey numbers in their five-plus decades of existence, although league rules prohibit Jim Otto’s #00 from ever being issued again. Numbers for even the most legendary Oakland players get recycled on a routine basis.

San Diego Chargers (3)

#14 — Dan Fouts

#19 — Lance Alworth

#55 — Junior Seau

The storytelling device of the Nazi hunter in search of German war criminals scattered to the four winds after World War II has been around so long, it’s hard to imagine a time when it was really fresh. And so it must have seemed especially visceral for audiences to watch Orson Welles’ 1946 film noir classic The Stranger, released just 17 days after the first anniversary of V-E Day.

The central plot of The Stranger concerns Mr. Wilson (the ever-brilliant Edward G. Robinson) of the United Nations War Crimes Commission and his hunt for the infamous Nazi war criminal Franz Kindler. Wilson releases a German prisoner and confederate of Kindler, Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne), in the hopes that he will lead him to Kindler. Before long the story shifts to the bucolic New England town of Harper, Connecticut; a place that seems infinitely more appealing to hide than Venezuela. Not that I’d know anything about that.

After a near-fatal encounter with Meinike, Wilson happens upon prep school teach Charles Rankin (Welles), who is set to marry the daughter of a Supreme Court justice. Once Wilson’s suspicions about Rankin are aroused, he ever so slowly begins the draw a net around him. That’s about as much as I want to touch on the plot.

While The Stranger is one of Welles’ more successful box office outings, I have to say I wasn’t overly impressed by it. We’re asked to make a few too many leaps in regards to the character of Mary Longstreet Rankin (Loretta Young), Rankin’s increasingly distraught new bride.

I also had trouble swallowing just how easily Mr. Wilson was able to ingratiate himself to just about everyone in Harper within a few days of his arrival. Essentially, Anthony Veiller’s screenplay was just a bit too lazy and convenient for my liking.

That said, there are enough high points in the movie to make it worth seeing. Welles — whose charisma pulses from the screen decades after the fact — has always been one of my favorite actors and he doesn’t let me down here. The choice of Edward G. Robinson as his nemesis was a brilliant one; his breezily sardonic style the perfect counterpoint to Welles’ almost primal masculinity. I also got a kick out of Billy House’s turn as Mr. Potter, the town’s jovial town clerk/drug store owner/busybody.

Behind the camera, there are some flashes of brilliance in Russell Metty’s cinematography, and I enjoyed Bronisław Kaper’s scoring.

There are two scenes in The Stranger that are worthy of further examination. The first takes place during a dinner at Judge Longstreet’s house. When the topic of Germany’s post-war reform is raised, Welles delivers a scathing, thoroughly convincing excoriation of the entire German nation, stating in so many words that nothing short of full extermination — of a kind not unlike the one they practiced in World War II — would silence their warlike nature once and for all.

The second takes place later in the movie, when Wilson confronts Mary with the truth about her new husband. To convince her about the extent of Kindler’s crimes, he shows her film footage of newly liberated concentration camps. I was both surprised and impressed that Welles included actual footage — although he spared us some of the more brutal scenes — of camps in the movie. I wonder how much of Loretta Young’s reaction was real, given that the footage was still so new and raw.

Despite being a bit uneven in places and little ragged in the plot department, The Stranger packs enough punch and boasts enough star power to make it worth seeing.

It seems inconceivable now, but until about the mid-1960s it was quite common to see celebrities hawking cigarettes like it was no big deal. In fact, many radio, TV, and movie stars literally owed their livelihood to sponsorship from tobacco companies. Imagine seeing someone like George Clooney or Angelina Jolie smiling widely in cigarette ads exhorting you to pick up a carton of Marlboro. Weird, isn’t it?

Anyway, here’s a gallery of 20 such ads from the 1930s through the early 1960s featuring movie and TV stars, as well as famous athletes, using their star power to get you to buy cigarettes and cigars. Most of these ads are courtesy the Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising site.

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I don’t know the date on this Marilyn Monroe color photograph, but I’m going with late 1940s. Regardless, it’s a stunner.

The reason I say late ’40s is that Marilyn appears to be a little older than when she shot this series of fishing photos in 1946, but she’s doesn’t look to be in full 1950s glamour mode yet. As I’ve stated before, this is my favorite era for her. She just looks so happy and full of life.

Three years before Chevrolet introduced the Biscayne model to its new car lineup, it debuted as a rather interesting concept car design at the 1955 General Motors Motorama car show. It’s fascinating for a few reasons. First, it stood in clear contrast to the growing trend of making American cars bigger and flashier. Secondly, it was a curious mix of styles, incorporating aspects of the then-current Corvette with a glimpse of the Corvair to come.

Of course, as with the Edsel, your eyes are immediately drawn to the front of the Biscayne. The odd headlamp placement and Jaws-like grill styling were bold, to say the least. The ’55 certainly bore precious little resemblance to the production model that rolled off the assembly line in 1958, as you will see in the final image in this gallery.

Here is a host of images of the 1955 Chevrolet Biscayne, most of which feature the shade of green that you would never see on an automobile now. First up are scans of the original Motorama brochure, followed by promo images and magazine covers. Most images can be clicked for a larger version.

Now here’s a peach of a color photograph from the World War II era. It captures a training exercise for the U.S. Army at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Here we see six soldiers aiming their firearms at an unseen target, all the while in the shadow of a Medium Tank M3. Note the rather unique offset turret indicative of the M3 tank, which was discontinued at the end of 1942 in favor of the iconic M4 Sherman.

Click for a larger version.

I’m no firearms expert, but the soldier in the front left looks to be holding a Thompson M1 submachine gun with drum magazine.